


The Theory of Solitary Comets And Their Orbit Around Fading Astral Bodies

by Anonymous



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Almost Kiss, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Stream of Consciousness, Terminal Illnesses, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 10:10:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19196728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: You haven’t told him. Yet. Maybe you will. You don’t know yet. You don’t know if he’ll still be here tomorrow.





	The Theory of Solitary Comets And Their Orbit Around Fading Astral Bodies

It happens in the middle of the night, when you’re both stumbling home from the beerhall with flushes high in your cheeks and your minds a little dizzy from the alcohol.

You see Edward giggling while he tries to stumble free from his coat, which is a strange sight in and of itself, because you’ve only ever known him to be the serious sort of moody that somehow makes him fascinating. Seeing him unfettered and candid like this is a strange indulgence, something so rare and unusual that you’re almost convinced you’re dreaming. That you weren’t actually surprised to learn that, despite being a year older than you, Edward has never had a drink before and you felt some distant offense when he called the men who hang around the beerhall stupid for wasting their marks on alcohol. So offended that you felt the need to drag him along and show him what it’s all about.

Now he’s giggling. Trying to muffle laughter into his gloved palm. His face is pink with the intoxication, his ponytail falling a bit loose from its tie, and his bangs frame his face just so. Almost as though he intends to knock the breath from your lungs.

Maybe it’s the beer, but you find your gaze wandering. All over his face. The curve of his jaw so sharp you could cut yourself on it, his nose long and strong but adding to the angular appeal of his features, his cheekbones that are almost dramatic in the right light, the sunset-gold hue in his irises. Down to the length of his smooth white throat, where you imagine the skin would be soft and supple if only you got the chance to touch it, to taste it. The length of his shoulders—they’re not overly broad, but it marks him as an adult despite his unfortunate height (you’re taller than him, you have to lean forward a bit to meet his eyes), lets the world know that he is no child. You imagine them to be sturdy, if only because they do not seem to droop despite how weary and worldly he is, if only because they can support him and hold him up when every natural force conspires to drag him down.

His arms, as he fumbles to slip his coat off, and you remember those times in the morning when you just started living together, and you caught him trying to fashion the prosthetics to his torso, him fumbling with the buckles on the straps and muttering curses under his breath while you held yours and tried not to stare at the golden expanse of his bare chest, oh God.

 _Need help?_ you asked, naturally helpful as you are. And you needed something to distract your mind, your hands. He started a little at your presence, grumbled something, then grudgingly accepted. So you went over and you helped him.

And it was a bad idea, because looking was one thing but touching was another and his skin was so warm and you ached to let your hands wander across his back, thumb the sharp ridges of his shoulder blades and trace the length of his spine. Golden hair spilled down his shoulders because he hadn’t done it up yet, and it seemed radiant in the morning light, seemed like an amber waterfall that you wanted to run though fingers through almost as bad as you wanted to taste his skin. Your fingers were trembling as you did the buckles up.

 _All done_ , you said, amazing yourself with the ability to keep your voice steady. To which he mumbled his thanks (he didn’t notice, and at the time you were grateful, but now you curse him because he _never_ notices) and got up to get dressed properly and you remember how you forced yourself to breathe as you watched the way his corded muscles contracted with each movement. He was sculpted with a diamond-tipped edge, carved from resplendent marble like Adonis, and you were struck dizzy by the sudden greedy hunger that ached through your chest.

On some level, you know it’s wrong, to think of men like this. It’s not only amoral, but illegal. Men have been beaten to death for merely stealing kisses, or locking their hands together—but what afflicts you is enough to condemn you to hell.

You are not the most religious of men. Never have been. Not since the Great War took your father to the battlefield but never brought him back. Not since your mother succumbed to sickness praying to a God that wouldn’t heal her. You are a man of science and reason, of logic and fact. And yet you cannot help staying up late at night pondering over the existence of heaven, its gatekeepers, sins that are within your control and those that seem to spring up within you like this has.

And you don’t want it to be him, of all people. You know that he is a transient, is a visitor in this space, a nomad who has no roots. At least, none that remain, and none left to cast out. He seems to dream through life while the rest of the world lives in it, drifting between shadow and corporality, a flicker on the walls before he departs at the first sign of morning. You know that someday, he will leave and you will be bereft, alone, waiting in the spaces of echoes in memories to taste nostalgia.

Still, he is... beautiful and brilliant and you can’t help wanting him, even a little bit. If only to get trapped in his orbit for a moment, a comet drifting through the void. He won’t be the star you settle on, but he’s a star and he’s bright and you think it would be nice to linger, just a little bit. Catch some of that light in your icy surface.

In the present, Edward has finally managed to hook his coat on the rack. Subdued laughter still gushes from him in waves. It’s so strange to hear him laugh, so strange and so lovely. Most of his smiles are of the nostalgic kind, branded by sorrow and marred by a past he never speaks of save for wild stories and crafted fictions he wants you to take as fact. But to see him like this makes something in you soften, a weakness in your knees and a warmth in your sternum.

“Shit,” he mutters as he staggers over to the couch and you close the door behind you. “Oh fuck,” he says as he reaches out to steady himself on the couch back with one hand, the prosthetic hand. “Goddamn,” he says as he leans against it, swaying, his long ponytail like the pendulum of a ticking clock.

A ticking clock. You went to the doctor’s last month and the diagnosis you got in return wasn’t promising. Furthest thing from it, actually. You haven’t told Edward—about the crawling tickles in your lungs that won’t leave you alone, which you at first thought were allergies until one evening when it _hurt_. You haven’t told him. Yet. Maybe you will. You don’t know yet. You don’t know if he’ll still be here tomorrow.

But for now, here he is, pink in the face and grinning strangely wide and he’s still snickering like he’s caught in the aftermath of a particularly good joke. And there’s flyaway hairs sticking to his cheeks, fine-golden threads. You can see the lines in his throat, the V of cartilage framing his adam’s apple, the dip in his clavicle faintly visible past his unbuttoned collar.

Part of you wonders if he can hear how loud your heart is beating.

“So you had fun?” Again, you amaze yourself. You and your level voice. You sound a bit hoarse—you can blame that on alcohol, maybe. Maybe.

“Those guys’re a _riot_!” is the laughing response. He’s talking, of course, about some of the other men at the beerhall who cracked dirty jokes and made silly comments and somehow managed to persuade him into drinking five pints of beer, as opposed to you, who was wiser and only had two.

The beer these days is watered down due to regulations, another shitty rule passed by a government none of Germany ever asked for and seems to exist only to spread misery amongst the country. But Edward didn’t seem to mind so much. And by the third pint, you saw the iron clamps he usually keeps firmly affixed to his being abruptly loosen, the tension and the aftermaths of unsaid losses leaving him as his eyes misted with intoxication. In hindsight, the lack of the arm and leg—lower body mass—probably made him so susceptible to the alcohol and its effects, made it so quick to kick in and strip his inhibitions from him. That, and this being his first brush with it.

It was irresponsible of you, perhaps, to let him have that much. You were supposed to be watching him, to prevent any alcohol poisoning and to advise caution even when he threw it carelessly to the wind. But by the fourth pint he was touching you everywhere, throwing his arms over your shoulders while he leaned his head against you, his breath against your cheek and his lashes fluttering and you could feel the rumble of laughter in his ribs. The beating of blood in your head and ears drowned out reason. He was smiling and laughing and he would throw his head back as though in elation and before you knew it, there was another empty glass added to the growing collection. It was only after you were emerging from the dizzy adrenaline that you realized his words were slurred, that you probably should have stopped him two pints ago.

So you paid the tab and walked him back to your shared residence. He stumbled the whole way, sometimes barely stopping himself from tripping over his own feet because he was too busy emphatically waving his arms around while he rambled wildly. You don’t remember much of what he said. Probably something about other worlds, about the alchemy he has a strange obsession with, his fantastical tales that captivate you even as your skeptic’s mind notes the fiction of them. Maybe he was exclaiming about the other men, their (not-so-funny) jokes and their tall-tales that he simultaneously scoffed and laughed at (you couldn’t help but note the irony, there).

But you remember vividly when, at one point, he actually doubled over from the force of his own laughter and you stood there, marveling at the sound of it.

His face was practically red from the alcohol. You knew that if he wasn’t sick later, he would at least wake up hungover. That won’t be fun for him. He has no tolerance and you really, really, _really_ shouldn’t have let him have so much. You’re not even sure why he even _wanted_ to drink so much. Maybe he just got caught up in the atmosphere of it all. You can’t really blame him for that, but still—it was silly of him.

He’s so silly. And so weak. So very weak.

And so are you.

“Alright, you.” Do you sound fond? You do. You sound fond. You blame the alcohol in your system—watered down or not, your brain feels dizzy, distant from your body. You’re pleasantly warm, but that might just be from standing here and basking in his radiance. “Time for bed.”

You half expect him to protest, but instead he glances over his shoulder at you and seems to consider you for a moment. His eyes are half-lidded, his lashes bronze against his amber eyes. You’re flushed a little from the alcohol. You definitely don’t feel your face get a little hotter, because you certainly and emphatically did not mean it like _that_.

Whatever he sees, though, it makes him somber again. A heavy exhale frees itself from his nose, his head drooping. His ponytail is a silken gold ribbon as it drips over his shoulder. “Okay.”

Disappointment tries to debilitate you, but you won’t let it. There’s not even a point in being disappointed, because after all, you expected the lively demeanor to evaporate at some point or another, anyway. For all that you’ve ever known Edward, he’s been sullen and wistful in all the worst ways. Unexpected joys can pass over him, can brighten the darkness that clings to him. A glimpse at what he could be, in another life, vivacious and brilliant and clever and witty. But it never lasts, never sticks, never manages to chip away the icy stone face of his melancholy.

Still, you can’t help wishing you knew what the cause was, if only so you could be rid of it and he would smile much more. He has such a wonderful smile...

You shuck off your coat—far more gracefully than he did, you’d like to note—and then make your way over to him. Without even hesitating, he’s listing against you, his head finding a perfect place on your shoulder like a puzzle piece fitting into place—and oh, isn’t that ridiculous. What is going _on_ with you, that you’re suddenly thinking in prose and poetry?

You blame the alcohol, the sickness, something, anything. After all, you’re a scientist. You’re not supposed to think like this.

But it’s so, so hard, you think while you guide Edward back to his room. It’s so hard when he is beautiful and wonderful and you—you didn’t think it would _feel_ like this. All the things you’ve heard about, er, _this_... they’ve mostly been about adultery and sinful indulgences and a perversion of carnal pleasure. And it’s not as though that’s not part of it, because you can smell his skin, you can feel the warm weight of him against you, and that has something in your middle tingling warmly. But the physicality, it seems, is just a component in a grander scheme, a cog in a great machine that is assembling itself inside you even as you try to restrain yourself.

And you think that could want this, if you’d let yourself.

He all but flops onto his bed, once you arrive in his room. The mattress creaks beneath his weight, the springs groaning. The tie nearly falls loose from his hair, so it spills out in a shining aureus half-halo around his head. His lashes flutter with a deceptive delicateness. Low amber light is cast from the nearby lantern left to burn on his desk (somewhere in the back of your mind, you chide him for his carelessness, he could have burned the whole building down—and wouldn’t that be so painfully apt?). It spills across his lovely features, a chiaroscuro, a play of light and shadow carving out the angles of his face. You suck in your breath. He looks more divine than human, like he’s composed of the fantasies and the fictions that spill from his lips as naturally as breathing.

You watch those lips twitch as he breathes. In, out. You wonder if they’re as soft as you imagine. What they taste like. It’s scary, frightening. Exhilarating, wonderful. And you _want_.

Suddenly, his face is right in front of yours. You don’t remember him sitting up, blinking up at you guilelessly in a rare, unguarded moment. You don’t remember leaning in, you head dizzy with the alcohol and a sudden surge of boldness in your veins. But then your breaths are sharing the same space and his eyes fill your vision, amber-bright, the color of sulfur and spontaneous combustions and you used to think the ignition of rocket fuel was blinding but now his eyes are in front of you and you can’t even _think_ straight. And you’re leaning and he’s leaning, and your head is still fuzzy from the beer, and you still remember the way the doctor’s words punched breath out of your ravaged lungs and the desperation to scrap up what little time you have left, and you think you might just—

But he inhales, and he turns away so sharply it leaves you dizzy.

It takes a moment for the rejection to sink in. But when it does, so does the realization of what you’ve done. Almost done. Oh God.

You jerk back, coming to your senses. Throw a hand over your mouth to keep the nausea down. Oh God. Oh _God_ , please let that have been an alcohol-fueled fantasy. Please don’t—

Edward looks anywhere but you.

“I’m sorry,” you say hastily. And you are. You’re sorry. You don’t—you don’t want to ruin this. You don’t want him to _hate_ you. First and foremost, he is your _friend_. Maybe one of the best friends you’ve had in a long time, who endures your quirkiness as you endure his and whose mind sparks brilliantly when it meets yours and you don’t want to _lose_ him.

“S’okay,” is his reply, but he still won’t look at you.

You could blame it on the alcohol clouding your mind, or the sickness that had mortality rearing its ugly head in the mirror. You could even blame it on this feeling burgeoning within you, snaring up your heartstrings. But it doesn’t matter what it is if you’ve screwed up.

And you have—you know you have. Because you have crossed a line and blurred boundaries that weren’t even supposed to exist and you may have just given him the perfect excuse to finally _leave_.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, and this time, of all times, your voice fails you. It shakes. It whimpers. It trembles with its own weakness.

That has him looking up in surprise. He blinks at you, strangely bewildered. “I... said s’okay.”

“I’m _sorry_ ,” you say a third time, and your eyes sting. You haven’t really cried in years, you don’t plan on crying now. But then again, you didn’t plan on trying to kiss him, either. “I-I shouldn’t have— I _know_ I shouldn’t h-have— I—”

Before you can say anything else, though, he reaches out and tugs you by the arm until you’re sitting next to him. The mattress creaks when you make impact, but not as loudly as when he flopped on it carelessly. Your lungs give a painful spasm that has you choking back a coughing fit, a reminder that breathing is not a luxury like it once was. It hurts to swallow it down, to try remembering what it is to breathe while distress rises to a feverish pitch in you.

And then you nearly leap free of your skin when he all but falls into your shoulder. His nose is a blunt probe, his forehead pressing against the bone of your shoulder, and then you’re having trouble breathing for an entirely different reason.

You force yourself to relax. Force your eyes not to sting. Force your heart to at least not beat so loudly, if it can’t stand to slow down.

“I _told_ you,” he mumbles into your shoulder, his breath _warm_ through the fabric of your shirt, “s’ _okay_.”

Some strange mix of elation and bewilderment, of surprise mixed with an utter relief, sweeps over you so strongly that your frantic heart almost leaps out of your chest to avoid drowning in the oncoming tide.

A long moment passes, carved out from uneasy silence. Uneasy on your part, relaxed and lethargic on his. You are the one who needs to breathe, your face pink from shame and your nerves still humming despite the assurance. He said “okay”, but you’re not quite sure what the boundaries of “okay” stop and start.

Does he mean it is okay that you’re... well, that you are the way you are, and he isn’t going to reject you because of that? Or does it mean that he doesn’t mind you not only having such thoughts, but having such thoughts about _him_ , in particular? Does it mean, maybe, that he isn’t as put-off by the attempt as you originally thought?

Something about that last thought makes you feel foolishly hopeful. You can feel how flushed he is through your shirt. It’s probably the alcohol, but some funny little flutter in your belly would like you to believe that you did that. That you make him almost as flustered as he makes you. It’s a selfish voice, of course. You try to ignore it.

The most important part is that he isn’t outright rejecting you, spitting slurs or looking at you as though you are less than human. That, in and of itself, is a relief to you. It’s the least you hoped for, and now you have it.

You don’t really know what this means about him, though. If he’s like you as well—which, again, isn’t something you _should_ hope for, because even that won’t guarantee reciprocity—or if he just doesn’t have any hatred for those like you. And either way, he still turned away when your mouths came too close together.

And you still crossed a line.

“I’m still sorry.”

Something like a chuckle is muffled by your cotton shirt. “S’ _okay_. How many times I gotta say it?”

“Really?”

“Fuckin’  _yes_.” He raises his head, props his chin on your shoulder as he studies you curiously. The candlelight only serves to make his gaze glow softly, cast highlights in his hair. You hate that part of you wants to try kissing him again. “Just—didn’t know that you were... y’know.”

This is no way to broach such a heavy subject, to tread such fragile ground. Not with slurred speech and minds fogged by the influence of liquor. But Edward has never been particularly light of foot even when sober. Words and tact are a weakness of his, even if he’s grown better at it. You don’t mind. Never really have. It’s just the way he is, and you can’t begrudge someone for that.

To avoid dislodging him, you shrug with only one shoulder. “I only figured it out recently.”

“Oh,” he says, blinking once. He doesn’t look as surprised as you expected him to be, and that annoys you a little, for some reason.

You’re about to say something—something perhaps blunter than you normally would, he’s not the only uninhibited one here—but he looks away suddenly, before you get the chance. His head never moves from his perch, but his eyes leave your face as though in a hurry. They flicker over to the wall, his brows softening and he seems to bite the inside of his cheek and if you didn’t know any better, you’d say he almost looked sheepish. Which isn’t right, because there is nothing apologetic or self-conscious about Edward Elric.

Well, nothing self-conscious anyway. You’ve caught him mumbling apologies into his pillow late at night. Not that you’ve ever said anything, of course.

“‘Cause of me?” he asks, quietly.

A sigh leaves you, and you turn your eyes to the ceiling, if only to avoid the cutting curiosity in his gaze. “Maybe. I don’t. It’s.” You make a futile gesture with your hands. “Complicated.”

It’s not a lie, but it’s not a whole truth, either. You’re still not sure _what_ this is. You _suspect_ , sure—but you’re a scientist and you don’t come to conclusions without running tests and analyzing data. The scientific method, tried and proven.

(But really, you’re mostly just scared to give it a name, because naming it is terrifying in and of itself and you don’t really want to give him a reason to pull back before you’re ready.)

Here you are, a comet caught in the gravity of a wandering star in some lonely corner of space. It is far from stable, this tenuous agreement you’ve come to. Far from safe, far from secure, probably not what’s best for you at all. But you’re not ready to let go yet, not ready to migrate and leave this celestial body behind.

In your peripheral, you note him faintly squinting at you, like you’ve suddenly blurred at the edges of his vision and he’s trying to get you back into focus. But whatever he sees, he seems to accept, if the way his mouth quirks is any indication. “Sounds like a pain in the ass.”

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a pretty accurate summation of... well, feelings in general, really.

Your gaze remains fixed on the ceiling. This whole thing, you know, would be a lot less awkward if you hadn’t just tried to kiss him. Because then you wouldn’t have to ask. And now? Now you need to. You can’t not. (Damn you and your scientific curiosity.)

“You don’t feel the same, do you?”

Though you don’t look his way, you can feel the soft _thwap_ of his ponytail against your shoulder as he hastily turns away. “I...”

He does not finish. The silence speaks for him.

You close your eyes. It doesn’t come as a surprise, have been bracing for this ever since you began to notice changes in how you looked at him. Collisions leave impact craters. You knew this, even as you found yourself falling victim to his gravity. Somehow that doesn’t make it hurt less.

“Can I ask why?” you hear yourself ask. Again with the level voice. You really are amazing at this, pretending to be alright when you aren’t.

When you chance a glance over him, there is guilt plain on his face, as clear as though it were a living thing rampaging behind the cage of his skin, glimpses caught through the iron bars. It makes your throat tight to see that. It was never your desire to force any reciprocity. Blood cannot be squeezed from a stone, and you are friends before anything else. They say it is better to have loved than lost and you would be content to not even have loved ( _oh_ , that’s such a heavy word) if only he wouldn’t escape into the void again. What you have now is worth keeping, even if it is not whole. No matter what you want, this is the foremost of your concerns.

Stupid. Why are you asking for an explanation? It’s terribly selfish of you. You don’t even need it, really. He doesn’t owe it you.

“Sorry,” you say. Because this would have been fine, if you hadn’t tried to kiss him. He would never have known, you could have pretended, and this wouldn’t have intruded upon your friendship.

If only it were someone else whose gravity pulled you into orbit.

“Stop _apologizin’_ ,” is the huffed response. There is a click as his knee moves, and you blink at him in surprise when he brings it up to his chest to curl both arms around it. His hair is half-down from the loosened tie. This, along with the strikingly vulnerable gesture, has you marveling at how small he looks. How crushed. “...it’s not you.”

That actually gives you pause. And you blink, not sure if you should be disappointed or hopeful.

“It’s—” A heavy sigh leaves him, even though you didn’t ask. He brows his head, forehead pressed against the ridge of his false kneecap, bangs falling over the sides of his face like a curtain at the end of an act. Concealment, hiding. This probably isn’t a conversation he wants to have, ever thought he would have to have.

He seems to curl up tighter. In the wrong light, he looks less like a broken man and more like a forlorn child. You struggle to remember that he’s only a year older than you, and you are barely of enlistment age yourself. Sometimes you forget. Sometimes he acts so old and other times so young and it’s a duality you adore even as you resent it. Sometimes you want to pry even though you know it will only have him clamping up, and you suspect that the only reason he’s even talking to you at all is because of the alcohol.

Finally, he says, voice low and muffled by his pants, “...you look like my brother.”

This... is the last thing you were expecting.

You remember the day you first met—when you were only fifteen to his sixteen and apprenticing under a Polish rocket scientist you honestly didn’t think would take an interest in you but miraculously had. At the time, you were glowering up the barrel of a fuel jet when you caught him in your periphery, staring at you, his gaze searing into you from across the room while he lingered at Dr. Oberth’s side. You thought he might be another apprentice, not a visiting scientist touring the lab. Even now, you feel a little sheepish for your assumptions back that.

Dr. Oberth waved you over enthusiastically when he noticed you looking. He introduced you as one of his brightest pupils. And Edward’s gaze never left yours as you made your introductions, as you shook his (then, only working) hand. You tried to smile even as you noticed his complexion was uncomfortably pale, as you took in the complicated storm of emotions in his blazing topaz eyes.

In the past, he’s spoken of mirrors. He’s taken from his tales real people he claims to know but doesn’t know at the same time. You’re still not sure how much is fiction and how much is fact, but you know that the bereft look on his face when he stares out the window is not figment of imagination.

And you feel a little silly for not putting the pieces together sooner. Some scientist you are.

“And s’just,” Edward goes on, somewhere between apology and pain, between guilt and grief, “he’s my _brother_. And even if you’re _not_ , I...”

...oh.

Of course. You can’t fault him for that. If you were in his situation, you doubt you wouldn’t act the same. Turn away if they tried to kiss you.

But what it really means, actually, you realize as the revelation sinks into your blood and flowers frostily beneath your skin, is that it isn’t _you_ that keeps him here. Not really. Not ever. And that stings a little, even if that’s not how he meant it. It’s definitely _not_ how he meant it—very rarely are his intentions to hurt others, but sometimes the intentions don’t line up with the consequences and you still lean back, struck by a sudden pain in your chest.

In a flash, you realize it was never _you_ that was the wandering comet. You were not the lonely icy rock hurdling through the void in search of something to orbit around. All this time, you thought you were, because it was Edward that convinced you to come with him to Munich and it was Edward who you found around you almost constantly and you thought it was you who was orbiting around him. After all, what need would something so bright and so brilliant have to orbit around another object? Especially an object whose light is fading, dimming, as this sickness crawls inside your lungs and eats you from the inside out and the doctor wasn’t able to tell you how much time you have, but it’s short and quick and you’ll burn out faster than any star is supposed to.

Perhaps this is how Galileo felt, when everything shifted and he discovered the Earth was no longer at the universe’s center. Only this is the reverse. You’re the stationary object to Edward’s aimless comet. You have your research to ground you, meaning and ambition, something to anchor you in place as you rotate slowly on your axis. He has only nostalgia and loneliness, aimlessness, and it makes him into a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it streak shining through the night as it disappears into the horizon. By chance, you managed to catch him—this nomad without a solar system, this satellite ejected from his orbit and trying to anchor himself to some semblance of familiarity. You were lucky.

And you, in your blundering foolishness, misconstrued it all. You thought  _you_ were the icy rock he caught in _his_ periphery and decided to bring _you_ into orbit. Thought you needed him. Or he needed you. The lines blurred, somewhere down the line.

Really, you should have noticed by now.

Maybe you never noticed because your gravity was never enough to bind him. It never will be. Not permanently, anyway. You didn’t think you had any, but what you have is not enough. If you really are the spitting image of his brother—who he rarely speaks of, who you know from what makes him sad and what makes him nostalgic—then all you are is a path he took out of remembrance. You have the image of another person superimposed over you.

So your light will reach him, but never touch him. Not the way you semi-hope it will. Never. Because you—you will only be an echo to him.

He orbits you, but he doesn’t _see_ you.

“I see,” you say. You’re not really sure what else to say. It’s all so much at once. Your head is spinning a little. You’re the inert one, and he’s the comet you managed to catch before he burned out.

Except you’ll be the one burning out, if the grim look on the doctor’s face was any indication.

It hits you then that you can’t tell him. Not when you’ve seen him grieve over old bereavements, watched as they gnawed at him from the inside out. Those are the distant pains, things long-lost to the horizon. He aches already, lonely and lost in the great void. You fear what another impact will do to him. You fear what a fresh wound will look like, a fresh crater blooming across his surface.

You don’t want to find out.

Maybe he’ll be able to detach from you, by then.

But is that really what you want? Maybe. You don’t know. It’s hard to know, with something as nebulous as this.

With a sigh, you rise to your feet and inform him that you’re going to bed, because this is all too much happening at once and you really don’t want to think about your own impending mortality while you’re still lightheaded from the beer. Best to confront this in the clear light of morning.

Edward doesn’t respond, though. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t twitch. Keeps his head bowed as though he is mourning all over again. He remains painfully still even as you bid him a tentative goodnight, thank for being understanding, apologize again for your impulsiveness. You suspect he’s forgotten you’re even there, lost among the cosmos of distant memories he never expresses to you save for in fantastic stories. Probably a coping mechanism, now that you think about it.

As you close the door behind you, something tells you that it will be a long while before he moves.

Another spasm hits you once you’re in bed. You muffle the coughing fit into your pillow. You think about comets and their ephemeral orbits around astral bodies. About what might happen to the comets when those astral bodies, when those stars, burn out. If the comets end up hurtling on through space again, bereft.

You think that, if you can’t keep him, you would at least want him to be free. Before you become another ghost hanging over his shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> So here's the thing. I really like the whole Ed/Heidrich dynamic, but I'm not a supporter of that ship myself. Simply because Alfons _is_ Al's other self and I don't personally subscribe to the theory that Ed can overlook that. Of course, I don't I disparage the ship or the people who support it. This is just my interpretation of it.
> 
> But as I said, I like the dynamic and I wanted to write my take on it. Honestly, this was meant to be this really quick drabble of maybe a couple hundred words but HOLY COW did this thing evolve. So, here we are.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading.


End file.
